Mistral Small 3 alternatives
Match · Updated July 2026
The closest alternative to Mistral Small 3 is Mistral Medium 3.5 — comparable intelligence (29.9 vs —); for a cheaper option, gpt-oss-120b runs $0.037/M vs $0.050/M; and the best open-weight substitute is Kimi K3.
Closest match
Cheaper alternatives
gpt-oss-120b
$0.037/M input · 23.8 intel
gpt-5-nano:batch
$0.025/M input · 19.9 intel
north-mini-code:free
Free/M input · 19.8 intel
nemotron-3-nano-omni-30b-a3b-reasoning:free
Free/M input · 14.9 intel
gpt-oss-20b
$0.030/M input · 14.9 intel
gpt-oss-20b:free
Free/M input · 14.9 intel
Open-source alternatives
kimi-k3
57.1 intel · open weights · 1.0M ctx
glm-5.2
51.1 intel · open weights · 1.0M ctx
minimax-m3
44.4 intel · open weights · 1.0M ctx
minimax-m3:batch
44.4 intel · open weights · 524K ctx
deepseek-v4-pro
44.3 intel · open weights · 1.0M ctx
kimi-k2.6
44.2 intel · open weights · 262K ctx
Frequently asked
What is the best alternative to Mistral Small 3?
Mistral Medium 3.5 is the closest alternative to Mistral Small 3, with an Intelligence Index of 29.9 (Mistral Small 3 scores —) at $1.50 per million input tokens.
Is there a cheaper alternative to Mistral Small 3?
Yes — gpt-oss-120b costs $0.037 per million input tokens versus $0.050 for Mistral Small 3, while staying within ~8 points of its Intelligence Index.
Is there an open-source alternative to Mistral Small 3?
Kimi K3 is the strongest open-weight alternative to Mistral Small 3 — downloadable from Hugging Face and self-hostable, scoring 57.1 on intelligence.